The unknown treasures of the Villa of the Papyri

By Robert Harris

12:01AM GMT 26 Mar 2002

TWO thousand years ago, on the Bay of Naples, on the outskirts of the luxurious seaside resort of Herculaneum, stood one of the grandest houses of the Roman world. The size of Blenheim Palace, it extended 250 yards along the shoreline, and included an Olympic-size pool.

This extraordinary construction, which has never been fully excavated, is now the subject of an intense academic controversy. Eight of the world's leading scholars of ancient literature, including four professors of Greek (from the universities of Bristol, Harvard, London and Oxford) have launched a campaign to recover what they believe the villa may still contain: quite simply, one of the greatest cultural treasures of all time. Unless work starts soon, they warn, it could be lost for ever.

If this sounds like a good story - which it is - you may be forgiven for wondering why you have never heard it. And it is, indeed, a curious feature of our modern media that, despite the explosion in the quantity of newsprint and the number of television channels available, most of what is pumped out is celebrity trivia, with as much long-term importance as the lifespan of a passing mayfly. But this is in a different category. In cultural terms, this is about as important as it gets.

The villa in question probably belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar and one of the rulers of the Roman republic. A century after his death, in ad79, the villa was buried under 100 ft of volcanic debris by the same eruption of Vesuvius that wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1738, it was rediscovered (accidently, via a well-shaft), and the excavators began to tunnel through it, removing statues and other objets d'art.

In the process, they threw away many lumps of what they took to be coal or charcoal, and it was not until 1752, when they discovered the villa's library - neatly lined with 1,800 rolls of papyrus - that they realised the discarded material had actually been books. It was, and remains, the only intact library known to have survived from the ancient world, and from then on, the subterranean palace became known as "the Villa of the Papyri".

These rolls of papyri were, for many years, very hard to decipher, and it was only in the 1970s that they began to receive proper scientific study from an international team of scholars, led by Professor Marcello Gigante of the University of Naples. Hundreds of lost works of Greek philosophy - including half of Epicurus's entire opus, missing for 2,300 years - and some Roman poetry were read for the first time. The author most commonly represented turned out to be Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher attached to Piso's household, who certainly taught the greatest Latin poet, Virgil, and probably also Horace.

This was, in itself, of immense interest. But it was increasingly Gigante's conviction that only about half of Piso's collection - chiefly the part originally belonging to Philodemus - had been retrieved, and that much more awaited discovery. Thanks to his initiative, fresh attempts were made in the 1990s to explore the old 18th-century excavations, and these yielded an astonishing discovery.

The villa was not merely built on one level, as had been thought previously, but was terraced down to the sea. It appeared that slaves had been trying to carry crates of books to safety when they were overwhelmed by the eruption. And the mosaic floors, frescoes and painted ceilings of these lower storeys supported Gigante's belief in the existence of a second library.

Unfortunately for scholarship, the project ran out of money, and all that now remains of the exploration is a huge, waterlogged hole, in which float the syringes of local heroin addicts, who use it as a rendezvous.

Gigante himself died last November. The lower terraces are still choked with volcanic ash and mud, and beyond the perfectly-preserved wooden doors which lead to them lies - what? Nobody knows. I have spoken to three of the eight experts involved in the campaign to save the villa. All agree that almost anything is possible.

There may be lost plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, or even the lost dialogues of Aristotle, as well as a host of other Greek writers. A contemporary copy of Lucretius's poem, On the Nature of Things - which has been recovered - suggests that the villa may yield contemporary copies of Virgil's Aeneid, or copies of Horace, or even Catullus (whose poems have only come down to us in the most tenuous form, via one corrupt medieval manuscript, itself now lost). And it must be possible that a family capable of owning such a villa also possessed a copy of Livy's History of Rome, of which more than 100 of the original 142 books are missing.

In short, in the words of the campaigners (and these are cautious academics, remember): "We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined."

In the meantime, the buried villa is threatened: in the short term by flooding; in the long term - like the whole of the Bay of Naples - by renewed volcanic activity. What is needed now is, first, money, to restart the abandoned excavation and, second, sufficient will on the part of the Italian authorities to see the thing through to completion.

Their argument - that they have enough to contend with, simply preserving what has already been exposed in Pompeii and Herculaneum - is understandable. But surely a prize on this scale, with the potential to broaden the knowledge on which the whole of Western civilisation is founded, is a task worthy of this generation, and should not be postponed to another. In the words of Epicurus: "We are born only once, and we cannot be born twice. Life is ruined by delay."